Archiviazioni – Art and Planning in Public Sphere, Italy

Archiviazioni is a platform for the artistic research and planning in public sphere. Through projects of investigation, production and inter-disciplinary experimentation (actions) and by the creation of a generative archive (archivica), Archiviazioni aims at stimulate a critical elaboration of the relationship between art and public domain in Italy and in Mediterranean basin, in dialogue with European and extra European contexts where similar problems, tensions and needs continue to generate experimental artistic paths in the public sphere.

These paths reply to a growing demand for social-cultural, political and economical change, which, in its different acceptations and dimensions, is at the same time the demonstration of a cultural transformation in progress, which starts from the claim of a different vision and function of the public space.

In Southern Italy, where Archiviazioni mainly works, artistic, theoretical and interdisciplinary projects are taking shape that aim at stimulate a shift towards a wider awareness about the central role that the individuals and the communities can play in the management and the creation of public space, reinforced by an historical-critical analysis of art and cultural expressions in Southern Italy as a political, social and economical form of protest and dissent, from the sixties until today.

As like as the growing number of participative and experience-oriented initiatives replies to the need (when not to a mere strategy of consensus) of “staying” among identities and cohabitations, among the dualisms which derive from being a place located between the sense of cultural and geographical belonging to the Mediterranean and at the same time being part of the political map of the so called “first world”; to the need to erode the apparently unavoidability of paradigms, through different dimensions of feeling and acting.

This reflection goes together with the urge to analyze the imaginative and cognitive forms of subjugation of cultural and environmental bio-diversities, that lead to the impoverishment until the annihilation of our psychological and physical ability to survive systems’ crisis. In this frame, the creation of spaces for inter-subjectivity, the experimentation ofpractices of changing and the diversification of the forms of knowledge’s production, are essentials.

It’s important that art, in its declinations that concern and involve the public sphere, keeps in mind the educative option as as one of the fundamental ones. The educational possibilties of the artistic languages (which is different from the “creative education”) can create a mutual relationship among different interlocutors. The review of the learning forms, towards an active and multidirectional modality, can challenge in both levels, experimental and scholastic, the observation and the flexibility of the point of view, the creative listening, the ability to deduce something from the object of discussion and the trespassing in other segments of individual and social life.

That’s what the public sphere shoudl be: the outcome in progress of the exchange between individuals and groups, between citizen and institution (public and private). The stimulation of a critical review of the public sphere’s issues, thourgh a verified quality of projects and operators, can represent a tool of territorial growth, relaunch and investigation, with drives from the local level to international directions, but in a different way respect to the noxious effects of the globalization and the colonization of imaginary and culture, made by the politics of the “big names” and the big events.

In order to be activated, the artistic and social processes need an audience that could welcome, reflect and reply to “another need”, which is not already existent, a need of action and reaction, that could bring to rethink the structural conditions of our everyday life, as individuals and collectivity.

Archiviazioni aims at extend the debate on art and public domain which is nowadays cultivated and practiced especially in Northern European countries as consequences of their last years’ public, financial and cultural politics. A debate to be increased in cultural, geopolitical and in methodological terms, for a critical reflection on a different interaction of art in public sphere but also on the reducing opposition between aesthetical formalisation and social utility.

A-Journal

A publishing space, that hosts texts and visual contributions by artists, curators, architects, theoricians and activists, designed as a platform for research and discussion on the relationship between art and public domain in Italy and the Mediterranean basin, in dialogue with European and extra-European contexts where similar problems, tensions and needs continue to generate experimental artistic paths in the public sphere.

Archiviazioni is a platform initiated by Giusy Checola on 2009, included in the program Lab 12:00 promoted by the SoutHeritage Foundation for Contemporary Art of Matera (Basilicata region). On 2011 it became a cultural association host for the first year of activity at the spaces of a tobacco factory in the countryside of Lecce (Puglia region), thanks to the collaboration of Anna Cirignola, Elvira De Masi and Toti Semerano and to the participation of Luigi Presicce, Salvatore Baldi, Margherita Fanizza and Federica Scorza.
Since 2012 Archiviazioni has been an extended platform for artistic and interdisciplinary research and production, from Apulia to other regions of Southern Italy and Mediterranean, and planning group. The group, composed by Giusy Checola, Pietro Gaglianò, Diego Segatto and Susanna Ravelli, collaborates with public and private subjects in the fields of contemporary art, education, culture and publishing. It conceives, plans and produces projects and activities related to urban and rural landscape and spaces, environment, responsible tourism and collective creative processes.